IN THE MAGAZINE

“LIST OF SCENES OF MY CHILDHOOD TO BE WRITTEN”

By Raymond Federman

Published December, 2009
Raymond Federman passed away recently, at age 81. Having been born in France, he emigrated to the United States in 1947. Five years earlier, his parents and two sisters had been captured in the family’s Paris apartment and exterminated in Auschwitz. Only Raymond escaped, a story the author would return to again and again in numerous works, particularly his novella The Voice in the Closet. In some 30 works self-described as “surfiction,” “playgiarism,” and “laughterature,” Federman built a myth of himself out of his life story and its constantly changing and reinterpreted particulars, questioning language’s ability to fully represent experience while at the same time continuing a passion to tell stories in new and inventive ways. His novel Double or Nothing won the Frances Steloff Prize for Innovative Fiction in 1971, and his Smiles on Washington Square won an American Book Award in 1985, in addition to the numerous awards his books received in Germany, France, and elsewhere.


1. Scene describing how my uncle Leon planted a tree in the courtyard of our building.

2. Scene describing the savings-account booklet I found in the box in the small closet, and how I succeeded in collecting the money when I returned to France for the first time, after ten years in America.

3. Scene describing how I once stole a ring in a department store.

4. Scene describing how after school with the other boys from our neighborhood we played soccer in the street, not with a soccer ball but with a little wooden palette that would demolish our shoes, which made my mother very unhappy because she could not afford to buy me new shoes. In fact, concerning shoes, I had to wait until my cousin Salomon’s shoes became too small for him to be handed down to me by my aunt Marie. But these used shoes were already too small for me because, even though I was younger than my cousin Salomon, my feet were bigger than his. I suppose there is nothing more that can be said about that.

5. Scene describing how mean one of the teachers in school was, and how he would throw a metal ruler at us if we spoke in class, and how when he came back from the war he had lost a leg, and he was not as mean, and how we would laugh when we saw him walk with only one leg and his crutches. We would call him le boiteux.

6. Scene describing how one day when I went to my cousin Salomon to ask him to help me with my algebra homework he tried to force me to suck his cock.

7. Scene describing how, one day, when I was playing doctor with my sister Jacqueline, we almost got caught by my mother. It was the day war was declared.

8. Scene describing how my cousin Salomon, one day, when we were playing in the street in front of our house, tied me with a rope and threw me down into a ditch some workers had dug in the street, and how he shoved a handkerchief in my mouth so I couldn’t shout, and how I couldn’t untie myself and answer my mother when she called out from the window of our apartment for me to come home because it was starting to get dark.

9. Scene describing the exodus at the beginning of the war, and how all the people left Paris as the German soldiers approached the city, and how my parents and sisters and me walked carrying suitcases on the roads of Normandy with thousands of other people, and how we saw French soldiers in retreat, and also how we saw dead people when the enemy airplanes fired at us with machine guns.
10. Scene describing how we wandered for days on the roads of Normandy, and how when we arrived in Argentan the Germans were already there, and how I was impressed with their uniforms, especially the officers’ uniforms.

11. Scene describing the house in Argentan in which the Germans put us, and where we stayed for almost a year, and how my mother would fix the German soldiers’ uniforms, do their laundry, press their shirts, and how my father would get stuff from the black market for the German soldiers, and how they would bring us food, and how in the evening German soldiers came to our house to discuss politics with my father, and how I would go to the store to buy bottles of beer for the German soldiers, and how before leaving late in the evening they would all raise their left fists and together with my father would sing “The International,” and me, too, I would sing with them in a soft voice. The German soldiers who came to our house were all Communists, like my father. My father explained to me that the best place for German Communists to hide was in the army.

12. Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.

13. Scene describing the Argentan Lycée where I got my certificat d’études, and how the boys used to fight each other with chestnuts that fell from the trees that surrounded the school playground, and how I would also throw chestnuts at them.

14. Scene describing how during the very cold winter we spent in Argentan, one day the German soldiers who came to discuss politics with my father unloaded a whole truck of coal in front of our house, and how all the neighbors were saying that we were collaborators.

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